Cooking Mandela's first taste of freedom

Of all the meals Dominique Macquet has prepared over his long career as a successful chef, the most memorable one was very simple: A variation on shrimp remoulade, white fish on a bed of peas and corn, and mixed berries for dessert.

“I’m actually speechless thinking about it,” he told America Tonight.

The diner was Nelson Mandela, and it was his first meal after 27 years of captivity.

Macquet, originally from the African island nation of Mauritius, moved to South Africa in the early 1980s and wound up working in a Cape Town hotel. None of the kitchen staff knew that the meal they were cooking was for Mandela, who was in the hotel for high-stakes negotiations about the terms of his release.

“It was a normal day until 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” Macquet recalled. “We saw a lot of strange characters with weapons, you know, checking you out – you had people who tasted the food.” 

Shrimp must have been a dramatic change for Mandela’s palate. For nearly three decades, he had subsisted on a diet that he described in his autobiography as “balanced – between the palatable and the inedible”: maize porridge for breakfast, boiled kernels of corn for lunch and more maize porridge for dinner, with the occasional vegetable mixed in. Other prisoners received a quarter loaf of bread and a slab of margarine, but “Africans, it was presumed, did not care for bread,” Mandela wrote, “as it was a ‘European’ type of food.”